Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

When I was a kid, I didn't work. I got a tiny allowance ($5 per week, or maybe per month), and every now and then I'd age or undergo a holiday, so friendly relatives would send me money. But the only things I wanted to buy were desktop computer parts and video games, and I easily saved enough money for those. Parents took care of everything else–thanks parents!

Later, I was a college student. Sometimes I wanted to buy Chinese food, but that's about it; I still had roughly no spending. (Apart from how expensive school was, but again, I mooched from parents and scholarships–thanks parents!). Still, I felt like I should earn money, so first I worked as a dishwasher for around $8 an hour, and then as an inept ResEd student web developer for maybe $9.50 an hour. Suddenly the savings I had slowly built from that $5 per week allowance seemed meaningless.

Still feeling like I should be doing something career-related, I nepotised into a co-op preprofessional software engineer summer job at IBM. (Thanks Dad!) That was $20 an hour, full-time, with overtime even! After a few months of that, I came back to that student web developer job and realized I didn't care about it at all–I'd written more than my share of abominable Perl forms, and with $13,000 in my bank account, why would I want to get paid $9.50 an hour to write more of them when I had better things to do? I helped them hire a younger minion and lounged around on my coins. The money I had made from the web developer job also never mattered.

After college, George, Scott, and I started Skritter, and apart from rent ($300/mo) and food ($6/day), I had a few other small expenses (lasers, bowie knives, whips, etc.), but really, life was cheap. Skritter survived at first off of the entrepreneurship grant our school gave us (more mooching). I was finally glad I had made some money at IBM, because those savings kept me out of debt until Skritter could slowly become profitable. I could also calculate utility and buy a few things, like a sick office chair and some large computer monitors–they were like like three cents per hour of use!

Across several years of working on Skritter and moves to Costa Rica, Pittsburgh, and Sunnyvale, revenues grew, but my spending habits didn't change–I was still living like a kid who occasionally needed to eat something or upgrade his computer. If I had to buy something, I'd buy the cheap thing—I mean, you gotta save money, right?

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

There's a thought experiment people use when they think about possible future technologies like teleportation and cryonics and brain uploading, about going into a teleportation machine that copies you and deletes the original. Is it still you? What if the original isn't deleted–are both you? Or if you get your brain reconstructed in two hundreds years after you die–still you? Or if you transition your brain from decaying organic matter to a machine that reproduces it exactly?

Turns out that yes, duh, it's still you (except maybe in that last case; creepy story!). Even if there is a time delay in the teleportation, or even if the copy isn't deleted. Which one is the original? They both are.

So sure, use the teleporter or become a computer, whatever. What I actually want to write about is what you would do if you could actually make a copy of yourself, right now. In this hypothetical scenario, no one else can do it, and it doesn't cost anything, just five minutes. I'll call them clones, but they're not babies–they have all of your experiences up until the moment of copying. And I'll call you the original, but you might as well think of it as becoming the copy yourself, because there is no original/copy–there are just two of you now (and let's say the cloning machine spins, so you can't even tell which one "was" the original). You can make as many as you want, and your clones can make clones.

Would you do it, and if so, how would you deal with becoming multiple?

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

A few months ago, I set out to test cold showers. Here's what I wrote for my experimental mission statement:

People are raving about what hormetic opponent process magic silver bullet it is to take cold showers. A little research gave supposed benefits of increasing circulation, mood, immunity, fertility, energy, exercise recovery, fat loss, mental alertness, pain and stress tolerance, cold tolerance, and skin and hair health. They're even supposed to stop depression and hair loss and tumors. I'm going to alternate two weeks of cold showers with two weeks of hot showers for the next two months and see what actually happens.

So excepting two days of each condition when traveling, every day for two months I woke up, did a 10-minute workout, immediately took a 7-minute shower, recorded my energy, mood, and shower discomfort, and took an 8-minute Quantified Mind battery. This wouldn't tell me anything about skin health and tumors, but it would get the main thing: does a cold shower begin one's day more vigorously than a hot shower?

Results

There were no observable differences on any Quantified Mind tests, suggesting that the brain does not care about the water temperature.

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

Chloe and I dated for six years. For three years*, we were long-distance. For five years, starting five months in, I was spelling out W-I-L-L-Y-O-U-U-M-A-R-R-R-Y-M-E* encoded in the love letters I was writing her for use in my Surprise Ultimate Romantic Proposal Resulting In Sobbing Engagement. On June 22, we wedded, and it went better-than-perfectly. The wedding site Chloe and I built together has details and some photos. The two-week honeymoon in China was not for the faint of heart, weak of stomach, or narrow of eye, so we had a great time.

I am even happier than expected to be married. Chloe and I keep clinking our rings together as if activating some marriage superpower. I am all over the parenting books reading about optimal lifestyle and nutrition before pregnancy in preparation for producing experimental super-infants. Book, parenting, and marriage recommendations are all welcome.

I don't know which things I will put on this blog. Usually I just make new pages on nickwinter.net for everything I want to either share or record for myself. We'll see how the SETT approach of presenting content compares.

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

You have probably heard of Soylent, the liquid meal replacement where you can conveniently get all your balanced nutrients by just drinking liquid Silicon Valley. I mean, you've already outsourced all your other chores to my fellow startups–don't you want to save another two hours per day and eliminate all superfluities?

No? Yes? Well, it's not for everyone, but I sure would like more time for my important stuff, and I've already eaten food tons of times. Plus, if I can have my default meal be a healthy one, I'll sacrifice extra tastiness (which is why I don't eat dessert). I'm in. Forget eating! Yet...

I like Soylent, but it takes a lot of trust in nutrition science to say, "Let's just combine a bunch of individual micronutrients that match the recommended daily allowances, since those are exactly what all humans need, right?" Never mind that some of the RDAs were established by a handful of weak studies–you still have to believe that not only did we get the nutrient levels right, but that those nutrients are all you need, and that they work in isolation, in the specific forms that are included in your Science Drink (which may not be bioavailable or bioequivalent).

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

04:06. The wake light has gradually brightened to 20% brightness, but I cut it off early. It's time to rise, silently and in darkness, cook some runny eggs, get on my longboard, ride through the empty streets to the CodeCombat command center, and begin hacking.

It's not actually that intense–Rocky gets up slightly earlier with a more annoying alarm, drinks raw eggs instead of runny ones, and then, you know, has to punch meat instead of keys. But I still feel kind of badass doing it–if I remind myself to.

Most of the time, stress just feels like stress. It feels bad. It's something to fight against. The pressure of trying to get everything done during Y Combinator weighs on me, my bug list is like overdue homework, and I'm not having fun, oh no.

But when I remember, I remind myself that this is actually pretty badass. Getting up when only ghosts and warlocks are awake? That's fierce. I approve. My weak human avatar wants to sleep, but it doesn't know what makes it happy. Longboarding through the grime to meet my destiny? I want that for myself. Hacking to the max until Demo Day and going to sleep at 20:00 for maximum productivity? Yes, this is the mission I accepted.

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

My head obsesses. I get songs stuck in my head so badly that I have to leave the room when "I'm On A Boat" comes on, and anyone who tries to troll me by singing "Party in the USA" gets warned and then ferociously tickled. (It's self-defense.) I don't like watching TV shows and have to limit movies because the scenes and plots continue to play in my head for days afterward, displacing the top idea in my mind.

The most interesting case of this is the Tetris effect. This where you do a repetitive activity so much that it takes over your subconscious, visually superimposing its patterns over your life. It's most noticeable when you're falling asleep. Tetris addicts would turn things they see into tetrominos, and their brains would be playing Tetris as they slept.

I have it bad. I've had the Tetris effect not only with all sorts of video games, but with things like coding, typing Dvorak, fixing grammar mistakes, responding to emails, hiking, tweaking CSS, and designing particle effects. Up until this week, though, it had only been visual, perhaps with some motor component.

It turns out I can get auditory Tetris effect, too. I had just spent the entire day strategizing about CodeCombat with George and Scott, talking startups with other Y Combinator companies, and listening to the YC partners dispense wisdom. As I was falling asleep, I heard a perfect Markov chain generator produce a conversation between Paul Graham, George, and Generic Startup Founder, complete with voices and appropriate verbal mannerisms, that went something like this:

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

For a few months in the beginning of 2012, the only exercise I got was doing 10-20 sets of pull-ups a day. I was hacking nonstop on the Skritter iOS app, and I decided to save gym time and just see how many I could do. I had tried sporadically forever (included weighted pull-ups and other silly things) to increase my max pull-ups, but from my untrained max of 13, I could never get past 15. Then Yoni suggested greasing the groove: do lots of easy sets throughout the day.

I tried doing 20 sets of 10 for 8 days, then rested 5 days and tested my max. Twenty! Well, all that other training must have sucked if it only takes a week to up one's max that much. I figured I was getting weaker at all my other lifts, but I didn't care, because over the next couple months at ten sets a day (eventually growing to sets of 16), I raised my max to 26.

Then I didn't do any exercise for six weeks, since I got busy with moving to the Human Hacker House. I tested my max pull-ups, and they had gone back down to around 20. Okay, lost some short-term gains there, I thought; let's see what else I lost, since I haven't done any other exercises for six months.

But my one-mile run was somehow 14 seconds faster than my previous plateau, and my bench press was 15 lbs higher than ever before, and my other lifts were about as good as they had been. Huh?

Why did my fitness and strength go up when all I was doing was pull-ups? I still don't know. (Do you?) But I just realized that even though I can't install a pull-up bar in this apartment, I can hang towels from door railing and do towel pull-ups!

Cofounder of CodeCombat and Skritter, experimenter of self, student of rationality, hacker of motivation. One summer I wrote a book, learned to skateboard and throw knives and lucid dream, trained for a marathon and other feats, learned a ton of Chinese.

I was thinking of 1) setting something up where I could monitor my breath rate while working at my computer and 2) using that to train myself to breathe slower. What do you think--is this useful? What are good solutions for tracking breath rate? What would be an ideal breath rate be?

I already know that I can sustain breathing at once per minute, but it takes a lot of concentration. Is it even healthy to breathe that slowly, or would thrice a minute be better? Will it work to train myself to always breathe this way?

Update 2013-10-12: at a party, my friend Jonathan Toomim measured my Mayer wave resonance frequencies to determine at which breath rate I got the biggest amplitude boost on the Mayer wave and the most increased oxygenated bloodflow to the brain: around nine seconds per breath. Now, whether this means anything in terms of increased health, performance, or affect--he admits it's still unclear. But it's pretty cool.